At Pegasus Airlines, Flex sales soar 22% with Google Optimize 360

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The Goals

The Approach

Create a multivariate test to determine the best-performing version of the company’s site

The Results

22% increase in Flex sales

Narrowing the focus

Turkey’s leading low-cost carrier, Pegasus Airlines, wanted to improve its digital user experience to drive sales of supplemental products. The airline had already been working with Hype, a Google Marketing Platform Partner, to measure every action and dimension of the business using Google Analytics. When the results revealed bottlenecks in the conversion funnel, Hype recommended a strategy using optimizations and A/B testing.

Specifically, Pegasus and Hype decided to focus on driving sales of Flex, an add-on product that enables flyers to make unlimited ticket changes. It seemed that customers were mostly unaware of the benefits of Flex, and Hype hypothesized that improving the copywriting and pricing presentation would improve sales.

Preparing for take-off

Hype had already set up goals, events, and segments within the Pegasus Analytics account, so once the account was connected with Google Optimize 360, it could run tests immediately. “The native integration between Optimize 360 and Analytics was useful for us,” explains Mustafa Esad Tatlıpınar, Hype’s conversion optimization expert.

To get started, they chose their experiment type — multivariate testing — and then chose their Analytics goal. The company then created new variations, such as different headlines, service descriptions, option labels, and prices. Some of these were created through the Optimize 360 visual editor, while others were created using custom JavaScript.

Optimize 360 empowered us to run experiments with over 20 different variations simultaneously. Additionally, with its strong algorithm, we found the optimal combination quickly. After seeing a 22% increase in Flex sales, we were able to scale the winning variation to all users in just few hours.

Emre Güney,
Head of Digital Growth,
Pegasus Airlines

Finding a 22% lift

At this point the team was ready to launch its experiment, letting Optimize 360 do the work of testing multiple changes on different sections of the page, and combining them to test multiple combinations. Because it pushes combinations that perform better and abandons those that don’t, the Optimize 360 algorithm quickly discarded low-performing variants.

The experiment lasted for 35 days with 869,000 visitors seeing the new variations. During the course of the experiment, the conversion rate for the Flex product grew by 22%. Once the winning variation had been identified, Hype scaled it to all visitors.

The native integration of Google Analytics and Optimize 360 helps us to detect bottlenecks in the conversion funnel and create experiments to solve these bottlenecks very quickly and effectively.

Mustafa Esad Tatlıpınar,
Conversion Optimization Expert,
Hype

A new cruising altitude

Looking forward, Hype and Pegasus are committed to using Optimize 360 to produce further business gains. “Google Marketing Platform not only helped us to grow our business and profitability but also to decrease the time required to prepare and publish an A/B test from one week to two or three hours,” Mustafa says. “That leads us to run more tests and gain more uplifts from experiments. Thanks to the Google Marketing Platform, we can run our business based on real data, and we are planning to use these tools for a long time.”